


White Cliffs

by a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Gen, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-14 00:43:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1246333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words/pseuds/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trigger Warning: Suicide; references to domestic violence (not of or by a main character)</p><p>For the prompt:<br/>Kirk kills himself and McCoy is an angel.</p><p>A very loose interpretation in that Jim doesn't kill himself and McCoy isn't actually an angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Cliffs

**Author's Note:**

> (I'm really sorry, I've not even proof read this because it's late, but I hope you like it.)

The chalk of the cliff is very white. All those dead sea creatures, fossilised and made into pre-school drawing materials. The sea lashes at the soft, crumbly rock, thick white foam, leaching it of its minerals and feeding it to the tiny shelled animals that will one day replace it.

Jim wonders if the sea will smash  _his_  bones to bits and make them into chalk cliffs. It’s not very likely. He’ll bloat and float, and in two days time someone from the coastguard with have the lovely job of dredging him out of the brine, safe in the knowledge that there was nothing they could’ve done to help. Pitiful, but not tragic. 

The foam and the cliffs are the only white things in sight; the sea is grey and angry and the sky greyer. The trees behind him should be rustling and mysterious and alive, but instead they’ve caught the glower of the ocean and instead they creak and sway like their backs are old and broken in the wind that isn’t violent enough for the sea below or the plans in Jim’s mind. 

Jim does not despair, because Jim doesn’t anything. He watches dispassionately as a gull with a broken leg limps along the ridge of his cliff away from him; going nowhere and doing it in agony. Each pained step and lurch forward taking it closer to death. 

Jim is only one step away. He can do it, and he will. 

He takes one last look around him, and almost falls in surprise. A man is standing there, grey like everything else, just a few metres behind and still walking forwards. His footsteps must have been covered by the wind buffeting the trees. 

"Get back!" He shouts, angry that someone would choose to encroach upon his final moments. 

"Or what?" Calls the stranger. "You’ll jump?"

"Yes." He says quietly, and then again, louder, so the man can hear. "Yes!"

"So what?" Asks the figure. Jim can’t really argue with that. So what if he does? Why should this man care about him? "You’re gonna do it anyway."

"Yeah…" He says again, feeling vaguely like he might already have jumped off the cliff and be having an out of body experience. Then resentment seeps back in - how dare this stranger not care? How dare everyone not care? "Who the hell are you?!"

There’s a moment of quiet before the man speaks and he takes it to calm himself down; he’s sure a lot of folks are angry when they kill themselves but he knows that as long as he’s angry there’s a part of him that thinks he deserves better, a part of him that wants to take better.

He’s scared, defensive in case the stranger notices, but he doesn’t seem to change his track. 

"I’m an angel," The man says, and God, Jim just wants to throw them both off together, the last thing he needs is some asshole trying to mess him around when he’s about to die. 

But he can’t be angry, so he reels it in. “Good thing you don’t exist, then.”

"Name’s Leonard." He offers a hand and Jim doesn’t take it, because Jim knows what happens when you give someone your hand; they drag you in like they’re going to catch you, and two days later "cry for help" has become "cry for attention" and they expect you to recover and be fine. 

"God's really taken a step down from Gabriel."

Leonard shrugs. "My parents loved me, but they didn't love me enough to just call me James."

Kirk tries not to spook. It's a common name, easy enough to pick out at random. "Ironic," He says. 

"How so?" Leonard asks. He's curious, and it's satisfying. Which isn't good. 

"My parents called me James, but I'm not so sure they loved me at all." He scuffs the underside of his left shoe on the very edge of the cliff. Grass and chalk crumbles, but Leonard doesn't flinch. 

"Nice to meet'cha, James." Leonard offers his hand again. Jim looks down at it and up at him and shakes his head. 

"It's not my name. They called me James, but my name is Jim." Leonard nods his acknowledgement, hand still stretched out in a gesture of friendship. Jim doesn't have any friends. "Aren't you s'posed to be eighteen feet tall and beautiful?"

"I am beautiful," Leonard says, with a certainty that only those who've accepted their failures and learnt to live with them can muster. "And you're thinkin' of Lucifer. I'm not that kind of angel."

Jim snorts at that. "Now don't you lie and tell me I've got into heaven. What kind of angel are you?"

Leonard looks out past him. His eyes are hazel and certain, but they catch the grey like everything else does. "There's a lot'a bones down there. Old bones, young bones, bones that come in pairs and threes and fours."

"Hell?" Jim asks.

"The bottom of that cliff. People that jumped into the sea and died."

Something in Leonard's voice would clutch at Jim's heart if he had one. It doesn't though; his heart is already at the bottom of the churning water and he's just got to follow it. 

"I'm an angel. I'm a doctor and I stop people from following them. The ones who survive, sometimes they call me an angel." Leonard says, and that voice is still tugging on the strings that once fed Jim's emotions. He wonders who didn't survive. 

"Oh yeah? How many's that?" Jim doesn't mean to sound cruel, but that's really all that's left - cruelty and apathy. 

"You're my ninth." Leonard shuffles forward a bit, and Jim doesn't shuffle back. If he did, the ground would crumble. This is the limit to his investment in the conversation. 

"I'm sorry to disappoint you," He says. "I think you should probably go back up to heaven or wherever you came from. You're not gonna change my mind."

Leonard blanches, another white thing against the cliffs and the sea foam, and then his face hardens again. "No."

"You can't make me!" Jim shouts, no one can make him do anything ever again.

"No, I can't make you. But I'm not goin' away, so the way I see it, you've only got two options," He jerks his hand, still thrust out between them, shaking slightly from maintaining the position so long. "Either you come with me, or you make me watch you die."

The cruel part of Jim could do that. But the part of him that can see a fellow suicide victim doesn't want to. "How do I know you're not just some sicko? Gonna drag me to your cabin somewhere and fuck me up and dump what's left of me in the sea?"

Leonard shrugs again. "Never heard that one before. I guess you don't. You don't have so much to lose, though. And you might gain somethin' instead."

"I got plenty to lose. I could lose the power to choose when I die." The only thing he has left. 

"You can always choose to die," Leonard looks disgusted for a moment, glancing away. "I'm offering you the power to choose not to. I'm offering you the choice to live. And don't you dare tell me you haven't been lookin' for someone to give you that."

Jim crosses his arms tightly across his chest. "Well you're too late. I already did cries for help and not quite fatal overdoses and talking and anti-depressants. I came out here to die in peace."

Leonard is angry now, the way Jim can't be.  _He deserves better._  "I seen people jump those cliffs kid and trust me they don't die in peace."

They stand there in silence, Leonard's hand stiffly jutting between them, skin going purple in the cold. It makes Jim shiver himself. 

"Fine, fine," Jim says, without meaning to and against his better judgement. "If I still want to jump in three days, I'm doing it."

Leonard gestures with his icy hand one last time, and finally Jim takes it. The chill is unpleasant, and it's not at all like clutching an alive person should be. 

Leonard turns around and begins walking without looking back, trudging his way back away from the cliff, towards the grey-green forest. 

"What stopped you from jumping?" Jim asks. 

There's no emotion in Leonard's voice as he replies. "I came after I killed my Daddy. He was sick," He adds, "I'm not that serial killer after all. Had no one, cept an ex-wife who told my little girl her step father was her real dad. But there was this woman there, all beat up, right where you were standing. I started off workin' in the ER in the less serious section, and I saw girls like her all the time. Twenty something, plain looking. Broken cheek bone, black eye, dislocated fingers all strapped together, like that'd do 'em any good. It's always the boyfriend. 

"I couldn't let her do it. I'm a doctor. I make sick people better, I don't... Throw myself over the edge with them."

His hand was warming in Jim's palm. A sick feeling was returning to his chest, like the kind he'd felt his first few suicide attempts, where he almost wanted to die but didn't quite. Back when he'd still believed that someone might actually help him. 

They trudge through the forest, back toward the main road. "Anyway. I didn't wanna go back home, so... I never left. It's weird. I just... Accidentally moved into that weird lookin' hotel back up the way. Meant to stay a night, but it's been two years."

Jim's beginning to wonder if Leonard survived at all. Trapped as other people's angel, that's not recovery. But then, Jim doesn't really know what  _is._ He's never seen recovery. 

They walk past Jim's bust up old car and carry on up the road, and somehow he knows that he'll never get into it again. He knew that this morning, but now he's certain. 

"What'll we do? What will I do?"

"Nothing." They're walking side by side now, Jim no longer lagging behind. He shifts his grip, so that they're holding hands properly. There's nothing in it, save for Leonard's mild distrust. "I was gonna watch Die Hard, and the Harold and Maude."

"Isn't Harold and Maude a bit... Suicide-ie? Cliffie? You know."

The hotel looms, an unpleasant Tudor mockery of a building. Leonard has a key.

"A bit. I like it though. We don't have to. I think I have something with less deaths in it." He unlocks the back door and leads them up a stair case.

"Okay."

"It's not." 

He pushes the bedroom door open and gestures for Jim to enter. 

It's a yellowish cream, typical hotel decor. There's a chunky cathode-ray TV and a DVD VCR player, and a bed which has linen on it which is too nice to belong the the crummy hotel and must be Leonard's. 

"You want a drink?" Leonard asks, going to the minibar that Jim supposes has become his actual fridge. Sure enough there's a carton of milk and various perishables in place of the peanuts and the tiny cans of soda that cost four dollars a shot. "Your options are basically orange juice or water."

"Orange, I guess..." Jim wonders if he should take his shoes off, but decides he doesn't want to settle in, not yet. Just in case.

He accepts a tumbler of from-concentrate orange juice, and holds the acid of it in his mouth until it stings his chapped lips and the ulcer inside his cheek. 

"You should get changed." Leonard tells him, clothes held out before him like an offering. He looks more alive, richer and browner and human in the artificial lighting. Less grey and more kind. More beaten by the world, but less resigned to it.

He looks down to discover that he's covered to the knee in mud and chalk. It looks like he's about to settle in after all. 

The en suite is not so nice, and there's evidence of mould that no doctor would tolerate having been ruthlessly evicted. But it's clean, which is better than the alternative. He takes off his sodden jeans, and on discovering his legs to be similarly muddy, steps into the shower. 

He cycles through hot and cold several times before deciding he's clean enough and giving up, drying in a towel too fluffy for the hotel and donning the spare pyjamas. 

He emerges from the bathroom with all the evidence of his earlier intentions simply washed away. 

Leonard is sitting on the bed watching the menu animation for Die Hard 2. 

"So," Jim asks, taking his glass and draining the crappy orange juice. "What do you do?"

"This," Leonard shrugs, like Jim's learning he does. "Recover. Not a lot. Sometimes I take a shift at the hospital in Olton."

Jim settles on the bed beside him. "Don't you ever feel like you're wasting your life here? Just you and the hotel and us crazies and our bones?"

"Nah," Leonard doesn't meet his eye as he speaks. "I can't waste a life I don't have. I nearly ended up some of those bones. I'm just... Takin' some time out, till I'm ready to go back to the real world and pick up my life again. After all, I came so close to throwin' it away altogether."

Jim nods. It feels good, not expecting progress; plodding away at the world as it comes at you. He thinks he might like to try it. 

"Well... I guess..." It pains him to say it, which is more than anything's done in a long time. "I guess I'm glad, that your bones are up here and not at the bottom of the sea."

Leonard drains his own glass of water. "One day, Jim, I'm gonna feel that way too."

One day, Jim's gonna make him.


End file.
